Susan Moffitt, John Hazen White Professor of Public Policy, and her research team at the Watson School’s Realizing Rights Lab have received the New England Political Science Association’s 2026 John C. Donovan Prize for Best Paper Written by a Faculty Member for their paper, “The Politics of Administrative Ease: Public Access to Local Special Education Information.”
Moffitt, who directs the lab, is the anchor author on the paper, which she co-authored with lab collaborators Lindsey Kaler, Cameron Arnzen, Alejandro Contreras, Bryan Natividad and Niamh Stull.
The paper asks what political and administrative resources help people realize their rights in the United States, focusing on the education rights of students with disabilities. To measure how easy it is for families to find local special education information, the team built a web crawler that mimics how a person navigates school district websites and applied it to districts in four states.
The researchers find that more than 80% of districts have at least one page that references special education, but the path to that information, the time it takes to find it and the terms districts use vary widely. The authors argue that both district capacity and public demand shape how accessible rights-related information is.
The paper is part of the EdWorkingPaper series at Brown’s Annenberg Institute.